


Heretic

by Darkhymns



Category: Original Work
Genre: Chidren, Disappearance, Gen, Short Story, Sickness, Strangers, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-12
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-07-11 09:41:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15969716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkhymns/pseuds/Darkhymns
Summary: The man was lost, but she was not.





	Heretic

**Author's Note:**

> Old work.
> 
> [Music.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KymiRzMcF_Q)

In the darkness of her fields, she waited, seated on the dirt ground as the horned man came for her. She had first thought, quite strangely, that the horns he wore were those of a caribou’s. They were just as grand, the moonlight gliding off their points like slivers of white off a calm lake.

They seemed much too heavy for his head, and this she knew very well. A year ago, before his sickness, she had helped her father prepare a caribou that they had slain for their dinners, ignoring the law that all horned creatures be spared. She had chopped off those antlers that had been soft to the touch, nearly dropping one end of it to the floor as she struggled with their weight. Those horns were now perched above their front door, like spindly arms reaching wide into the night, on her urging. Such a decoration charmed their neighbors still, except for one woman who would not tread near it. And the trophy brought her excitement, for when she would come back from her night fishing, many times she would stop with her breath caught, gazing at the wicked tusks that had sprouted from the wood of her home.

Did this man see that?

He had stopped just then, head raised, his form painted against the growth of evergreen behind him. She could not see the colors he wore, or the fur cloak that must be wrapped around his neck, for the night was chill, as was every other night here. No arm was raised in greeting – no other movement was made. In her own cloak, seated far from her porch, tuckered against the dry fields that refused to grow, she traced his shape, and realized she could not find where he separated from the blackness around him.

In this tundra there was green – faded and weak, but green nonetheless. In this tundra, they were free from the snows of the south, and the demons that lurked among the white. At an age where she had barely been able to walk, she had traveled from there, past the ice floes, the silence of the snow banks clogging her ears. Through much of that she had been held up by her father’s back, the rumbling of his voice traveling through her, switching from speech to lullabies like liquid.

She would fall asleep to that – to his low rhythm with her ear placed against his neck, to the frantic whispers of her sister who preached about eyes of coal trailing after them, (she was later lost to the caves where the bears munched on bones and rocks alike, later lost but not soon enough) to the soft complaints of her brother as he kicked at rocks he had unearthed from their white blankets that thinned with the distance, to the absent noise of her mother, her throat torn by a raider’s knife. She remembered crying whenever she saw her mother’s scar, as if the flesh there was churning, ready to gape open and take her in, drowning her in blood and blackness. She no longer cried now. She would not let herself.

They had settled here, a lone home among a scattering of trees, miles off from others. It would take days to reach the old woman’s cottage down by the river, a week or more to find the huntsman and the curious wooden sculptures he would make. And even more so to find a doctor, who refused to leave his meager lodgings of deerskin and incense. That was why her brother had not lasted long, the infection he had gotten from a wolf bite spreading through his arm, until only brown and green existed for him.

Her tongue reached out to slide against chapped lips, bleeding and cracked. She leaned forward, pulling her legs near her chest, taking a slow breath of chill air into her lungs. The shape had not moved. The man had not moved. Only standing, with those horns placed on him, like a bird’s perch. There was tilled land separating them, many yards apart. He was judging their harvest, judging this girl who exposed her head to the dead winter, unable to take her home where her father coughed, his low voice now a rattle of weakness, or the mother whose scar was all she could see.

She realized then – he had not come down the traveler’s path. Instead he had materialized out of the trees, where the ground was uneven, and the grim guardians of the southern lands ruled to serve the cold and nothing more. Her father would sing of such stories to her, of beast-men who cradled the fire like a newborn babe, and where conquerors of the snows dwelled, once satisfied to rule from their high thrones until one day, they had decided to venture past their walls. Their grandfathers had first escaped to lands of green, but the guardians’ hands held pikes of silver and chains of mist, and the winter winds blew at their backs to chase.

When the first flakes came down, they had packed and left. A risk to stay, so they had traveled far. A risk to stay, for it was in the snows where one loses their soul.

“Rest, sleep, my dear, as we run,” her father would sing, carrying her on his back, strong and sure, to places where more green existed, even if warmth did not. “For the horned shadows cannot follow, they cannot follow you. Where there is no snow, they are lost.”

This man was lost.

He walked forward again, boots trampling the meager sprouts of the field, spreading carefully tended dirt with each step. She stood up, shivering in her meager cloak, in her bare feet where she could feel the sharp-edged pebbles drive into her skin. She had not planned for this stranger, she had not planned for anything. All she had done was stomp out of her home, threatening to run, and was then stopped by a glance to those antlers overhead, begging and reaching for her presence. In the cold, she had waited, hearing the walls echo with her father’s sickness, her mother shuffling across the floor. She had waited, eyes shifting to those antlers above her door, frost coating its very edges, even though this was a land where snow could not find its way. The woman, who had muttered at those antlers, had seen the hints of ice. And she had hissed, “You stupid girl,” weakly throwing rocks at her that never reached.

But the antlers spread far, welcoming, inviting. The horned man raised his head, seeing it hanging above her door.

The moon was full this night, along with stars pricked against the velvet, yet his face remained hidden from her. The distance between them lessened, though the motion of his feet was never shown. The world shrunk instead, bringing him to her, and he was tall, so tall, like a mountain overburdened with snow, where a whisper would bring its brute strength down upon foolish heads.

There should be no snow here.

The horned man stopped again. He kept his eyes on her door, above it. Then he moved his gaze to her.

_I did not wait for you,_ she wanted to say, for she had not meant to wait for anything, it was true. Instead she kept her lips shut. He was close now – not enough for an arm to reach out and grab hold – but close to see her eyes, for her to see his.

Before her sister had rushed to the caves, to where bears starved of both sunlight and meat lived, she would continually speak about those they had run from. She had to, for their father no longer could, and their mother was useless. “Where snow falls, they will follow,” she had wept one night, keeping her from sleep. “They follow and they follow until they take your souls. It’s for them, they say. Only for them.” Every night, she would speak of this. Every night she would weep until she found those caves, brought on by a sibling dare, brought on by secrets of dread.

The horned man was lost.

From her windows she would watch the horizon, watching for movement as night fell. Winter nights are times of unyielding, of isolation, contemplation. The horned man was all three as he gazed down at her, eyes dark but the face meaningless. His horns were curved like a ram’s, elegant and strong where light danced along its surface. They were a shield, braced for conflict and suffering. They were not the same ones perched above her door, where ice had thickened it, spread far and wide to embrace the night and its frigid air. Yet the horned man kept shifting his gaze to it, watching how the moonlight glided off its points like slivers of a knife, freshly made and thirsty to taste anything but cold.

She once had dreams of a face looming at her window. On waking, she would never remember, for the face, she knew, was meaningless.

Her sister, of where only bones brittle against the stones were left, had preached about eyes of coal. The guardians would pluck out their own, and replace them with such stones, sitting from their high thrones. Stones painted black, hard against the ice and snows. They reached far with their hands, full of pikes and chains, blizzards pushing them on. They are lost without their snows, without those winds of ice tugging at their hands, for what could coal see?

The horned man looked down at her, silent, overbearing. He waited for her.

She saw that his hands were empty – even in this darkness, they were empty. She looked down to his feet, hoping to find a shadow that trailed across the dead fields, that extended into the evergreen, into the south where snow and ice thrived. Her father sang of such shadows topped with horns, horns that they were forbidden to hunt in a land of white. But there was green here, and in green, the horned demons cannot follow, and their laws do not apply. He sang to her, _We run and they cannot follow._

It is only in the snow where you lose your soul. So she had no fear as she looked at him. She simply turned away, bare feet numb against the frigid grass. The antlers stretched, reached out for her hands, welcoming her home. She flicked a glance over her shoulder, finding the horned man stay close behind her. The moonlight shone off those tusks, shining like water from the rays of the sun. She saw his breath, forming clouds of mist before his face. It was cold, yes, but there was no snow here. And where there was no snow, one cannot lose their soul. Through the door, she could hear her father’s wheezing, his own breath leaving, the air whistling against his ribs.

The horned demon was lost, but she was not. So she welcomed him home.

* * *

The wooden house by the forest outskirts, where the fields were barren and the occupants few, had long been empty before anyone noticed. The huntsman had been the first, hallooing at the door with freshly skinned venison on his sled, covered in layers of fur and leather as he offered trade to those who needed. None answered, and though he went to open the door, the antlers had been pointed low, their points sharp, dripping with ice. He had left before doing anything else.

The woman who had first muttered at the door continued to do so. A month after the huntsman’s visit, she would circle around the house, shaking her head furiously at the antlers, where icicles now formed from its ends, weighing it down. “This will fall, this will fall, and this will truly be the end,” she had whispered, and once she had fallen to her knees, digging her hands through the soil where sprouts for carrots and lettuce had long died. She had been searching for traces of warmth, of where the sun must have left its presence in this land far from the south, but the soil was hard and all she had left were bleeding fingers, torn and frayed, as if a wolf’s teeth had gnawed on them for hours.

The last to come were a pair of outlaws, one for murdering his wife, the other for stealing his neighbor’s cattle, and good fortune it was to find a home waiting for them. A place to finally rest their heads, even if the fields were worthless and the windows were dark as pitch. One had stepped on the porch, undeterred by the door, now opened, hanging by rusted hinges. Yet one step was all it needed until the antlers suddenly fell from their mount on the wood. It broke in half, the icicles shattering from it like weak chimes, the inside of the bone as white as the frost that lined the wooden railings. And the man then swore to the other that a wind blew from inside this house, numbing his face, freezing his tongue, but that was not why he had rushed off, yelping and screeching. For shadows were there, still and tall, like a mountain ready to fall, waiting for fools to approach. It had not been right, it had not been anything he would wish to see. His dreams would later be infested with that image, enough to stop his heart years later.

No one came after. The snows had fallen then, blanketing the fields and the evergreen, the huntsman’s home and the doctor’s lodgings, the hissing woman’s grave and the young girl’s bones where the bears munched on stones and ice alike. All had ran, for in the snows, the guardians of the south would not be lost, and they would carry pikes of silver and chains of mist in their hands.

 


End file.
